Fighting on the Caspian

On display here is the original front cover of Nikolai Lishin’s memoir On the Caspian Sea : a year of White struggle. Astrakhan is towards the top left-hand side, Baku and its peninsular on the left more than halfway down, with Krasnovodsk opposite, and Tehran at the very bottom.

Lishin had served in the Imperial Baltic Fleet and fled to the Caspian after being arrested in Petrograd. His recollections describe the experience of fighting in alliance with the British Caspian Flotilla, serving on the Royal Navy’s Ala Verdi and Kruger. Lishin went on to fight in other theatres of the civil war, leaving eventually in 1920 from Vladivostok. He would live in emigration in Riga but arrest would at last come again, and in 1941 he would be shot dead in Moscow.